Neo Cocoa: Elegant Chocolate Truffles

CAPSULE REPORT: We first met Christine Doerr and Neo Cocoa a year ago at the farmers market at San Francisco’s Ferry Building. She was offering pieces of her precious truffles; we had just eaten our way through the market and were stuffed to the metaphoric gills. But there’s always room for temptation. We bit.

Neo Cocoa makes French-style truffles, updated with flavor infusions, that melt in your mouth. The ingredients are local and/or organic: Guittard chocolate (founded in San Francisco), cream from the organic Straus Family Creamery over the Golden Gate Bridge and Sweet Earth Fair-Trade, organic dutch-processed cocoa powder. Read the full review below.

INDEX OF REVIEW

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Neo Cocoa Overview

Christine Doerr says that her creations are “the hearts of chocolate truffles.” I was puzzled by that phrasing until I tasted the chocolates and realized that the description fits perfectly.

These are dense, meltingly smooth, deep dark classic chocolate truffles, French-style without exterior shells—the direct descendants of the chocolate truffles invented by Escoffier in 1920 (read the history of chocolate truffles).

Neo Cocoa truffles have a few flavor twists I never saw coming.

Take the Freshly Zested Lime Truffle, for instance. I didn’t think that lime went so well with dark chocolate, and this piece has an amazing ability to switch dominant flavors, so that I first tasted mostly chocolate, then the lime came to the fore, then it was the chocolate again. Amazing! (It’s the best seller.)

The Mocha Cinnamon Truffle is a great chocolate, too, with strong (but not overwhelming) tastes that pair beautifully with the dark chocolate.

And the textural contrast in the Crushed Bittersweet Nib Truffle is almost startling, because the chocolate itself is so smooth—yet suddenly there’s texture, with a different dimension of chocolate flavor.

Truffle treasure: rich, deep chocolate mixed with a freshly zested organic lime and organic lime oil. It’s the most popular truffle, along with Almond Butter & Smoked Sea Salt; both can be purchased in single-flavor 6-piece boxes.

Appropriately, the boxes are a dark chocolate brown.

The roster of chocolates at Neo Cocoa is small, but it’s growing slowly. These chocolates are intense, but they’re not excessively bittersweet (you try pulling that off sometime!). While they’re probably best suited to those devoted to stronger flavors, I’m sure those uber-smooth textures will pull in many new fans.